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A young man who grew up on stolen food fuels himself on vodka and resentment for the new order. They resent him right back, this unproductive, uncontributing man, and each day he survives is a waste. Stealing is a quiet rebellion against the regime that has replaced the Romanovs, or so he assures himself, and ignores that the people he steals from have barely more than he does.
Dmitry is the first to admit that things are not so different, since, but the Romanovs had been a comforting fairy tale he had almost allowed himself to believe in. He doesn’t know if it is contrariness or pragmatism to resurrect the lost grand duchess for his latest scheme, but it quickly ceases to matter when he realizes his fool’s gold might be the real deal, when he realizes he will have to give up the only thing he’s ever truly wanted.
THE END – i’ll make up an ending, or post the ending if i’ve written it
(The end of the Holiday AU I truly intended to write.)
The streets of Leningrad are bitingly cold, worse than before, and normally Anya would skirt closer to the wall but Gleb had caught her hand when she nearly slipped on the curb and hadn’t let go, his fingers warm against hers. Maybe she doesn’t want him to let go. An officer should have better gloves - sturdy, leather ones like the soldiers Before wore, and she brushes the thought aside before it can consume her. She is simply Anya, now, and they both wear cheap, fingerless work-gloves in the new Russia.
“You were right, comrade,” she blurts into the cold air, as his fingertips stroke across her knuckles. His skin is warmer than the biting air. She glances up at him, and catches the flash of hurt. Ah. He had asked, hadn’t he? “Gleb,” she corrects.
“I’m glad to hear it,” he says warmly, and she doesn’t deserve it but she’s glad for it when he smiles fondly at her. “Right about what?”
Anya glances at the street - quiet, empty, and though there are always eyes in Leningrad, they won’t care about her gossiping in this case. “Your friend Veronika told me all sorts of lies.”
She can’t meet his gaze, so she can see that there’s nothing for him to trip over when he stumbles and her hand slips from his with her inertia. A moment later he’s in step with her again, his fingers flexing in the cold, and neither one of them bridges the gap even as the warmth leaks from her hand.
“What sort of lies?”
He’ll force her to say it aloud, and he’ll laugh and reveal it was all a joke they play on street sweepers or other workers. The police aren’t kind, and they aren’t caring, and Anya knows it as well as anyone.
“She said that you’re in love with me.”
It drops from her mouth like lead, and Anya can feel the bitter poison of it. No matter what he says, she’ll be the one to suffer, either laughed at or - or - or -
What is she afraid of?
His throat jerks as he swallows hard, and his hair falls into his eyes as he nods in understanding. Anya can’t meet his gaze, but she can’t focus. Can’t think.
“It’s ridiculous,” she blurts out, and twists to the railing, leaning her elbows against it and staring at the Neva. It must be almost midnight now, and she will have to wake early for work, and the snow starts to melt through her coat. “You should tell your friends -” Her voice cracks on the word like a dropped teacup. “- that it’s cruel to play tricks like those.”
“Anya,” he says, and the gentle coaxing in his voice is enough to ensure she doesn’t turn around, her eyes fixed on the glitter of the ice. It’s oddly blurry.
“Lies,” she hisses again, and brushes snow from the railing onto the river. The vodka has loosened her tongue and without Gleb’s uniform between them, she feels words spilling out like she’s knocked a bottle over. “I thought you’d be kind enough to lie about work, comrade. Pretend you weren’t the bloody murderers you are. I didn’t think you’d lie about me.”
The crunch of snow under his boots indicates he’s stepped closer, and Anya twists her fingers together to hide the shaking. They’re numb from the cold, but she is used to that. She has to be. She is immune to the cold and the pain that it brings. It’s only that she’s been warm tonight, and that is why the snow feels like needles against her skin. It’s only that she had pretended, for a moment, that things from another woman’s life could be hers.
When had Anastasia become the truth, and Anya the lie?
“It’s not lies,” Gleb says softly, and Anya presses her eyes shut. It’s nearly cold enough to freeze the tears on her lashes, but not quite. Small mercies. “You know what we do, and now you know how I feel.” His voice is strained in the cold, and Anya’s hands shake harder for it.
“I said - it’s cruel,” she forces herself to snap, “to lie to me.”
“I would never lie to you,” he says and Anya hates the confirmation. She’s been telling herself he’s nothing but a liar for weeks now, that his honeyed words had been meant to manipulate. This could be another lie, but when she twists on her heel and glares up at him, she knows it isn’t. She barely knows him, and she knows it isn’t.
Gleb stands a pace back, his boots in the muddy snow and his hand half-outstretched, as though he’d thought better of the motion. She knows the vodka must still be in his veins because his eyes are wide and dark and she can see, even in the dim light, the pulse of his heart in his neck, too quick to be natural. He shoves his hair out of his face roughly, gesturing to himself a beat later.
“I know what you think of me, the uniform, the -- all of it. I know. But you must know that I’ve only ever told you the truth, Anya.” He sounds wounded, and swallows hard. “Believe that, at least.”
“And you -” She chokes on the words before they can slip out. Love me. He loves her. “You don’t know me.”
“I want to.” He steps closer, and Anya’s not afraid. She never has been, not really, but her heart speeds in her chest. His gaze is wide and earnest and honest, so painfully honest that she can almost taste it. “So badly, Anya. I want to know everything about you, not just what’s in a file or what I can guess at, not - not -”
He trails off with an embarrassed wince, not that it matters. Her heart is crashing through her ears like the ocean itself, and her hand is on his chest a moment later as if she could feel his heart through the layers of wool and linen to compare the two. It’s vodka-soaked impulse to slide her hand up to his neck; she feels him swallow hard against her thumb as his hand comes up to wrap around her wrist, holding her there with his pulse fluttering under her fingertips.
“Give me a chance to know more,” he says - begs - and Anya feels trapped. There’s nothing more of her to know beneath the stamps on her traveling papers, except the bits of Anastasia she’s unearthed and learned and knitted into one piece, but he believes there is. His hand is almost too tight around her wrist and Anya has tears frozen on her lashes that he’s no doubt noticed and misinterpreted, because his grip is gone in a moment and his hands are hovering strangely in front of him, as if to say he can’t hurt her. “Don’t run away this time.” He laughs, painfully, and tucks her hair behind her ear before his hands pull away for good. “I want to prove I’m more than an office and a uniform, if you’ll let me.”
He believes there’s more to her than a tragic story and an assumed name, and he wants her to have the same faith in him. Anya’s head is spinning with lack of sleep and a surfeit of vodka, and her eyes fall shut under the onslaught of cold night air and the warmth left against her cheek by his touch, and then there’s the ghost of a breath on her face with his sigh.
“I see,” he says quietly, and her eyes open in time to watch him take a step back. His eyes don’t leave hers until he half-bows a moment later. Anya shudders down to her thin boots, and wonder what he knows about her.
And he turns to go.
“Gleb,” tears from her throat without conscious thought, and he turns so quickly, so eagerly, that she digs her nails into her palm through her thin gloves to try and ground herself as she takes a step. He’ll go to tell his police friends about her, because she’s given herself away somehow. That must be the truth of it. “Where are you going?”
“You said as far as the bridge,” he replies, carefully neutral, and nods to the sparkling Neva below them, the stonework around them even as he takes a step towards her again. “I may have been a soldier, but I know when I’m dismissed.”
It knocks the wind from her sails. He’ll leave, just like that, and she knows this because he let her go twice before without protest and now he will let her slip away again a third time, and she almost wishes he wouldn’t.
Anya wishes, and it’s been a while since Anya has wanted anything.
“Veronika said,” she begins slowly, and Gleb laughs brittlely.
“Veronika says an awful lot of things.” He carefully folds his hands behind him, the old military posture holding him together. “Maybe we should both forget them.”
She stares up at him, and wonders for a moment if there is something to be found beneath Anya that isn’t Anastasia, because if there is, it’s protesting both the idea of staying and the idea of leaving in equal measure. She’s flirting with disaster but she’s never been one for half-measures, and she glances over his shoulder and finds a clock.
It’s late, but it’s not too late.
Anya takes a deep breath.
“She said it’s good luck to kiss someone at midnight,” she says, in a rush, and Gleb freezes entirely except for his eyes, which are raking her face like he’ll find answers there. Anya bites her lip and waits out his scrutiny, even when she sees hope spark in his eyes and aches with it.
Somewhere, a clock chimes, and somewhere between the first and second strokes he’s unfrozen and closed whatever gap is left when Anya’s already taken two steps forward. His fingertips find her jawline, tipping her head up, and Anya hates the disbelief in his eyes, because there’s nothing else except yearning.
She closes her eyes and waits a half-breath and by the fourth stroke he’s managed to press his lips to hers hesitantly, and Anya slides her fingers into his hair, dragging him closer. Gleb wraps an arm around her waist, helps her balance when she stands on her toes.
It’s not helpful because he nearly stumbles himself when she swipes her tongue over his lips, but whatever sound he makes is drowned out by another stroke of the clock and Anya tastes vodka on his teeth and twists her fingers through his hair because she only has a few seconds left to pretend to be someone who can have this.
It’s messy and heartrending and Anya feels warmth down to her toes when his arms have both fallen to wrap around her waist, and the chiming of the clock has ended and her hand is still clutching his hair, the other against his chest, and one of them finally pauses to breathe, their foreheads still touching.
“For luck,” he says faintly, and she lets both her hands fall to his shoulders as he steals another kiss, though she tips her chin up and doesn’t protest, wouldn’t protest if he did it again and saved her from making choices on the subject.
“We need all we can get, in Russia,” she manages, and Gleb laughs, his breath warm against her cheek.
“You’re a cynic,” he accuses, but there’s a note of wonder in it. He enjoys the discovery, wants to know her as well as he can, and Anya abruptly remembers how much she has to hide.
“I have to go,” she blurts, and he hesitates as she bites her lip. “I have work tomorrow morning.”
“Of course,” he says with a laugh, and for a moment she thinks he might kiss her again, and she will let him. Then he’s taken a polite step back and smiled.
It’s genuine, for a change.
“I can’t distract such a hard worker,” he says, then adds in a confessional rush, “no matter how much I’d like to.”
The brief temptation of it - of running back to the warm bar and drinking more, kissing and being kissed and being just Anya for once - is dizzy, or maybe that’s the remnants of vodka.
“You should go back to your friends.” She wraps her arms around herself, remembers how cold it is without the warmth of the bar, of another person. “It’s late.”
“Hardly past midnight,” he says, but it’s not an argument; his smile says it’s almost a joke between them. Just past midnight, and just past kissing for luck.
Just past realizing she enjoyed his kisses too much, so she smiles gently and nods to the clock. “Happy New Year, Gleb.”
He laughs and reaches out to brush her cheek again, his fingers cool but warmer than the night around them. “Happy New Year, Anya. I hope this isn’t goodbye.”
There’s another half-moment where she thinks he’ll kiss her - he wants to, it shows - and then he’s pulled himself away and left her standing on the bridge, looking down at the Neva’s ice and wishing for once that the seasons would slow their change and stay winter just a little longer.
I will kindly ask for the siren song confrontation, after the "I've come to take you home", please and thank you.
(This is cheating, a little -- this is an alternate ending to Siren Song. But it is written.)
Before the coronation, Anya sits on the steps to the dock and laughs, exhausted. The heavy crown almost slides off her head when she rests her face in her glove, listening to the sound of an ocean she'd barely survived a decade ago.
They want to announce her engagement. They want to announce her title. They want to announce Anastasia, and Anya does not know what she wants, except that when her foundling's steps sound against the aged wood, stern and serious, she bites back a hysterical laugh.
My foundling, she whispers, her free hand moving almost without thought to mirror her words in sign, my foundling with those expressive eyes, back at last – what more could you want?
He pulls a silver dagger from his jacket and Anya’s heart stops all over again as he says in his siren-call voice, “I’ve come to take you home.”
Later, when the arguing is done, the knife clatters to the ground and the sea breeze across Anya’s cut palm earns a hiss from the would-be princess. The bite of metal had hurt, of course, but she’s been in pain all night; the crown still pulls at her hair and the corset reminds her of drowning and the knife to her throat, her Foundling at the other end, had smarted of betrayal. The sound of a silver hilt against the dock forces her would-be murderer to turn sharply, his attention wrenched from the incoming sunlight and his incoming doom to her now-bleeding hand.
Well, she wants to sign. It’s not like he was going to do it for himself.
His mouth snaps shut and she wonders if he had planned to speak again - something self-sacrificing and stupid, no doubt, and she wonders how she knows his voice so well after a handful of words - but that’d no matter now. He rips the edge of his shirt into a long strip and she bites back a mad laugh; she’s wearing an elaborate gown and he’s in a thoroughly-ruined shirt and she’s almost jealous of his freedom. The dress will, perhaps, hide the blood better, and that is all she can say for the crimson tightness of it; it hasn’t done her any good as a costume.
He wraps his fingers around her wrist and stares at the lazy ooze of blood before he presses the fabric into it, a steady distraction from the blood-wet ring of his fingers on her wrist. The morning light is enough now to read the concern in his eyes, and she hates him. He’s worried for her cut hand when she knows now that he’ll melt into sea foam without her blood to break the spell. He’s worried for her cut hand when, an hour ago, he’d pressed a knife into her throat and said he’d come to end the Romanovs.
How stupid she had been, an hour ago, to think he would do it. How stupid they both had been to set this in motion; they’d been fine for weeks, and now her insistence on the crown and his keeping secrets has left them with a few hours until sunrise to right it. Anya knows her fiancé is waiting for her back at the palace but she knows, perhaps more firmly than Dmitry ever will, that relationship was based on a lie.
Dmitry had agreed when she said he saved her, and perhaps he believed it. Now, her half-remembered nightmares of being pulled from the shipwreck make more sense; she looks up at the stranger she saved from the beach, and finds the expression of concern all too familiar.
“You saved me,” she accuses, more fond than angry. Her Foundling glances at her from under his lashes, dark eyes wide with disbelief she could have withstood but for the hope that sparked beneath it. “From the shipwreck,” she adds, as though he could misinterpret her, “and you sang to me.”
He nods, finally, his hands like iron on hers to hold her steady. It could be blood loss, but Anya suspects it’s a different shock making her feel so strange, making her wrap her hand around his forearm and take a deep breath, try and fit his face to the monster of her dreams and nightmares. If he is -- now what? What is left?
“What’s your name?” she hisses, and his hand presses the linen into her cut more firmly before he even attempts to answer, before he asks her for anything in return. In the strange pre-dawn like she can see his tongue press against his sharp, inhuman teeth, his lips pulling back strangely to force his voice into something almost-human.
A name, and one she can’t quite comprehend the sound of. It’s half-complete, she can tell; there should be a sign to accompany it, and he’s never used one to refer to himself before. He’s never had to, when they’re the only ones who know his language.
He signs please a moment later with his off-hand, as if she isn’t already trying to curl her tongue behind her teeth the way he had.
“Gleb,” she echoes, and knows she missed some nuance, a sound her throat cannot grasp, but his thumb digs a helpless bruise into her wrist so it must be close enough. It is good to have a name for him, after so long; “her foundling” is not quite appropriate, anymore.
Neither is her almost-murderer, or any number of simple titles.
The light is more pink than silver off his teeth and against his dark hair and she forces herself to take a deep breath. The motion glitters, and his eyes fall to the gemstones still arrayed across her chest, jolt to her tiara, slide to where his hands are trapping her. She can feel the blood he said he needed stopping its flow under the pressure, and though she doesn’t relish the pain, she pries his fingers from her and tugs the shirt scraps free.
Her palm is crimson, though the pink of the morning light cannot be helping, and she realizes she has no idea what to do next. She thinks - hopes - he would’ve told her if he needed to drink it or something worse, but she realizes a beat later that she would allow him to, if it kept him alive. She’d allow more than she should, if it meant they were both safe and alive at the end of it.
That doesn’t negate what must be done in the moment.
Her hand moves to his cheek, to reassure, and her blood smears from the open wound across his cheek and lips, and he shudders under her touch. His skin is cool and then warm and then hot, burning, and the color of his skin ebbs away like the tide beneath her blood, leaving him paler than the half-drowned assumed-sailor she’d found so many weeks ago.
His hand finds her wrist again, drags her close enough to press his lips to her bleeding palm, and when he draws back he is colorless except for the smear of red of her blood across his lips. His skin pales until the edges harden, split, and become black scales that trace down his throat and as though they’ll choke him. Anya doesn’t realize her fingertips are chasing the strangeness until her foundling - her? - until Gleb tugs her hand away and presses the fabric back over her open wound. He’s no less emotive for having his hands too bound up to sign, and the complexity of his gaze is only slightly undercut by how his eyes fill out and darken, how her blood is still smeared across his colorless lower face.
She takes the makeshift bandage and wraps it around her palm as an excuse to wrench her gaze from his. She does not want to know -- but she cannot resist, and she looks up in time to realize he had taken a step closer just as he undoes it with a step back, his hand flying to his throat. When it comes away, there are parallel slices that cut across his skin and he takes another halting step backward before she can take one towards him. Gills flutter against his skin and Anya cannot tell which of them is having a harder time breathing, now.
He halts at the edge of the dock and Anya ignores the mad impulse to reach out and catch his collar, drag him back onto land and demand he explain - so, so much more than he’s explained so far - but it will not keep either of them safe. He stares at her for a long moment and then cries out in pain, flexes his fingers and stares in horror as the flesh between them inches up into webbing. (That’s strange; he shouldn’t be horrified to see himself again.) She flexes her fingers in sympathy, does not think of twisting them into his collar or his hair, and Gleb takes a deep breath and spreads his arms wide, ready for the painful shock, and drops backwards off the edge with his eyes pressed shut.
Anya rushes to the edge of the dock, the remnants of his shirt crumpled against her crimson skirts like a forgotten talisman, and watches the ripples spread and vanish into the waves. After a beat and a breath and nothing more than bubbles, she mouths a quiet prayer for him.
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Black Feathers and Silk (for the made-up title meme) - Pure Anon
send me a made-up fic title and i’ll tell you what i would write to go with it
The dead cannot walk, but the sleeping can. Caradoc becomes familiar with this over the decades, as Aurora half-wakes and dances about her castle.
He dances with her, sometimes.
It's a fine autumn afternoon the first time Aurora kisses Caradoc. It cannot be meant for him, and yet it leaves him shaken and hungry in a way his kind should not be. Faeries are untouchable, giving gifts and curses and never hearts and yet this little fey-touched child-mortal has kissed him and Caradoc cannot do more than stand there and feel himself shattering beneath her before he runs.
It takes another year for him to return to take up his post by her bedside. He looks at her, really looks, and remembers the years between their ages are counted in ones and tens and not hundreds.
Caradoc has been a tool of his mother's revenge for so long even he forgets he was not there when Carabosse was cast out of the faerie revels, nor when Aurora's parents slighted her. He has only his mother's stories and yet he has more basis for enmity than this girl-child --
Which is how Carabosse might've referred to her. It is not how Caradoc should refer to the young woman. Aurora had proved that the day they danced in the garden, challenging him and infuriating him in turns before the thorn and his mother's curse made her quiet.
Caradoc misses the brilliant young woman from the garden.
Anya lives in an empire built on shell casings, and everyone is scrambling for a gun – and when the whole world is madly pursuing power, pursuing order, it is pure creativity to pull the trigger and simply watch the aftermath bleed out.
Anastasia stands above and away from the mess, and the crown is almost as heavy as the pistol. (Princesses, after all, do not get their hands dirty.) Her sash is almost as red as the blood.
There is a lot of almost to their story, a lot of what if and hardly any what is.
Still.
An aesthetic for @fallen-chandelier‘s Shells which she had better hurry the heck up and post for me.
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What is "Twin Statues" and is it as angsty as it sounds???
Oh, even more so! It's a cousin of my feralverse concepts, which is to say we take a PG-13 musical and shift it into a more mature, possibly horror-laced version of itself.
---
Hans grins, a feral animal in silks and wool as she takes the bait, and then it is gone under a mask of concern. His hands spread in front of him, calming, seemingly away from the sword at his hip as he approaches Elsa. She staggers back, glancing at her hands in horror. “How was I to take it? She talked of trolls and prophesy, of true love's kiss —”
Oh. Elsa's eyes snap up from her unfairly unbloodied hands to meet his. “— and you refused.”
“She was ice, Elsa." He discards the title and the kindness in his eyes all at once, his hands dropping towards his waist almost involuntarily. "There was nothing to do.”
“You could have tried.” Elsa hasn’t been able to control her powers since she first hurt Anna, but there is cold coalescing around her fingertips and for once that is what she wants. “You could have tried, and you didn’t.”
Hans had banked on her hesitation, but Elsa doesn't care what happens to her as she lunges at him. He can't draw a sword, not this close, and she presses her hand to his chest and does not think, lets her emotions control her, and Hans feels the cold shoot through his rib cage as he brings a hand up to shove her away.
They both sprawl to the ground. Elsa gets up first.
If Hans was feeling generous, he would call the look on her face regret.
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Hansanna and 9 from the cliché tropes writing meme. :3c
9. There’s only one bed and we sleep as far away as possible from each other but wake up cuddling.
Set in the AU where Hans was betrothed to Elsa as a child, warded in Arendelle just long enough to remember his fiancée’s weird, gangly sister, and sent away when said sister nearly died.
-----
The stop at the Trading Post was meant to be a short one. They’d get new clothes for Anna and Hans, carrots for the reindeer, and continue up the North Mountain to find Hans’s betrothed, who’d handled the news of her fiance and her sister sneaking into her room … poorly.
Extremely poorly. Even if they’d just been searching for an explanation of why Elsa froze them both out.
Anna had handled being removed from the warm sauna and buzz of conversation far better, although with no small amount of complaining. It was impossible to tell what Oaken put into the gløgg up here, but Hans could feel the remnants of one tankard still curling in his chest warmly. Anna, smaller and unused to alcohol, must be feeling it worse.
“How much did you have to drink?” he asked, arm wrapped firmly around her waist, which had been mercifully clothed by one of the other women in the sauna, who’d grinned and fixed Anna’s hair with the sisterly affection born of being warm and full of alcohol together.
“One,” she said firmly, then frowned. “Maybe two.”
Cups, he hoped, and not anything more than that. Anna craned her neck to look around.
“Where’s Kristoff?”
“He said something about how ‘the crook who runs the place’ wouldn’t let his reindeer inside, so he’d stay in the barn.” Hans nodded to a door in the back. “He said either of us was welcome to join him, but Oaken had a spare room.”
“Oh, a sleepover!” Anna flew from his arms the second the door was opened, giggling.
Hans hadn’t felt cheerful in so long it was almost offensive to watch her laugh. Her sister was freezing the country, had fled from both of them, had revealed she was an ice witch and neither Anna nor Hans had known, and Anna was giggling and drinking.
She hadn’t left the palace since their childhood. She was his fiancee’s sister. He was responsible for her. He really should’ve said something earlier.
He’d been warded in Arendelle as a child, once the betrothal was official, and he’d never known his intended was cursed. Two years he’d spent playing with Anna and studying with Elsa, and he’d never known. Apparently Anna hadn’t either, but it wasn’t much comfort to know they’d both been unaware of the ticking bomb by their side.
“Hans,” Anna said in the present. “You’re going to have to take your boots off.”
She flopped over onto the bed and wrapped the blanket around her, hair fanned out on the pillow to halo the look of amusement still on her face. The room was barely larger than a storage closet, but it fit one bed that looked, to Hans’s eyes, far too narrow.
“I didn’t realize he meant one spare bed. I should go --”
Anna burst into another fit of giggles, which at least dislodged Hans from the door frame, stepping closer to make sure she wasn't’ going insane. Anna pushed herself upon one arm, her eyes dancing in the approaching sunrise.
“Are you going to go sleep with Sven?”
“Sven?”
“The reindeer? The one Kristoff talks for?” She grinned. “I’m Sven and I sound like this --”
“I remember,” Hans interrupted hurriedly, wondering how thin the interior walls could be. “I’ll go sleep with Sven, in the barn.”
His face must’ve given away how little appeal the idea had, because Anna, with the air of someone surrendering a great treasure, gestured with the corner of the blanket that she would share it.
“Anna.”
“What? It’ll be a stupid sleepover like when we were kids. I’ll keep to myself over here, if it makes you feel better, proper Prince Hans of the Southern Isles.” She stuck her tongue out, and Hans sighed, dropping to the edge of the bed and yanking his boots off. It felt good to be not completely frozen and it felt better to be off his feet and the barn was cold.
At least he could keep an eye on Anna here.
He was learning not to underestimate her. If he slept in the barn, there was a chance he and Kristoff would wake up to find she had vanished entirely to chase after Elsa.
“Last time I agreed to a sleepover, I woke up with my shoes full of marbles,” he pointed out, as if she had forgotten, but Anna had a sharp memory.
“And soap, right?”
“And soap! You put soap in my shoes, and they were never the same.” He tugged his jacket off - no sense sleeping in something so uncomfortable - and draped it over the foot board of the bed. This was easier. If he ignored the absolute impropriety of sharing a bed, it was easier.
“In defense of five year old me,” Anna pointed out, shifting over to make space, “I was absolutely right. The soap made it very hard to get the marbles out.”
“Watch your back,” he threatened, grabbing the other blanket - thank Oaken for small mercies - and flopping down with his back to her.“You’ll wake up one morning and find marbles in your nice dance shoes.”
She gasped and elbowed him. “You wouldn’t!”
“Ow!” He, kindly, did not give in to the urge to kick her in the shin. “What happened to staying on your side of the bed, Princess Anna?”
“I’m the model of propriety,” she protested with a yawn. “You’re the one threatening me.”
“Your shoes,” he corrected.
“My shoes,” she agreed, sleep creeping into her voice. “That’s better, I guess.”
“Goodnight, Anna.”
“...’s morning.”
She dropped off to sleep quickly enough, and Hans stayed awake, biting the inside of his cheek to quiet his thoughts.
These two were gonna be trouble, Kristoff reflected, standing in the doorway with a mug of Oaken’s eye-watering coffee. The prince had managed to capture the wayward princess, which was good, and wrangle her into bed, which was neutral.
Kristoff took a louder-than-necessary sip of coffee, and neither budged.
The Darkling walked away, and it felt like a severed limb.
Aleksander had bigger plans now, ones that required his full attention. Why would he stay and lavish his attention on a Sun Summoner who was already bent to his will, one who would help him with or without her consent? Alina’s fingers traced the antlers. Her stag, her antlers, her grafted protrusions.
Stupid. The tears spilled over her eyelids. Stupid.
But it hadn’t been that long since the Winter Fete. Alina had egotistically fancied she’d caught him off guard, soothing his fears and holding his wrist until her light chased away his darkness.
Alina’s hands didn’t leave the horrible protrusions at her neck even as she crumpled to her knees. He’d done this, had taken her light just as she learned to love it and twisted it to his will.
Stupid.
The tears were impossible to stop, and why bother? The sobs came muffled at first, barely more than hitching breaths, but Alina didn’t have any pride left. She cried all the tears that had built up inside her since she was a child who’d begun pushing her every emotion down. She’d been sickly because of that, and she was through being weak. The tent felt claustrophobic, choking, dark, oppressive. The shadows at the corners of her vision danced mockingly, reaching out to grab at her until a ball of light erupted from her hands to chase the dark away.
Alina hadn’t summoned it. It was his light now and his will calling it forth. When she looked up she wasn’t surprised to see the Darkling with his hand outstretched to her. The sliver of antler melded into his skin was even more horrifying up close, as if it was trying to twist free to rejoin the ones inside her.
Perhaps she could still catch him off guard, if his expression was anything to go by. The thought was darkly ironic.
“How did you do that?” he demanded, kneeling in front of her, grabbing her hands. The sunlight strengthened, amplified by his closeness.
“You taught me.” Her tears finally subsided and Alina did her best impression of his half-formed sneer. The Darkling’s eyebrows shot up.
“I taught you to call shadow, Alina?”
Alina’s eyes widened and she glanced frantically around the tent. There were still shadows in the corners, seething and reaching out, held back by the sunlight he had called from her hands.
“No — I didn’t — I couldn’t.“
Both of their eyes landed on his hand at the same time, the shard of antler whiter in the blinding sunlight. Almost as if the sun was spilling from it instead of her.
His sunlight in her hands. Her shadows at his back.
“Oh,” she thought she heard herself say, as fresh shadows danced around her fingertips and vision again.
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